


Family Ties

by natmerc



Category: Enchantment Emporium - Tanya Huff
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Developing Relationship, F/F, F/M, Gen, Multi, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Polyamory, Slice of Life, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:36:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natmerc/pseuds/natmerc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Graham Buchanan got involved with Allie Gale, he got involved with her family too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Ties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Emily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emily/gifts).



> Beta read by Ambyr, BrightKnightie and Andi. Thanks very much! Any typos and grammatical mistakes left in are definitely all mine.

Family Ties

It took Auntie Gwen two months to get the hex marks completely off and Graham Buchanan still wasn’t sure whether the time lag was deliberate or not. Whenever he’d press her, she’d start talking magical mumbo-jumbo and then abscond with Joe, disappearing for hours at a time. It didn’t help his mood any that she “apparently” needed to have him bare-chested while she magically snipped another thread off.

There was no getting around it. He was marrying into an insane, huge and complicated family that was so far off the track they needed square wheels to get around. That and most of them had enough magic in their pinkie fingers to wipe him off the face of the earth.

Of course, there was Allie. All she’d need to destroy him was the tip of a fingernail. Thinking of her helped a lot when the relatives were irritating, which was most of the time. That, the sex, and the mental pictures he sometimes got of bopping them off in ways without ending up getting killed himself. He couldn’t help it. He’d spent half of his 26 years working for Kalynchuk as a bodyguard and assassin. That sort of training didn’t let go.

Graham had had the hex marks so long, he couldn’t remember ever not having them. He knew, logically, he hadn’t had them as a child in Quebec. Hadn’t had them growing up, part of a rough, mostly country family with more cousins than he could count and enough brothers and sisters to know that even if they built that third addition to the house his parents kept talking about, he still wouldn’t have his own room.

Each time Auntie Gwen took another mark off, it hurt like hell. It was as if Stanley Kalynchuk was cutting into his skin with one of his silver knives all over again.

“Does it have to hurt like that?”

“Which would you like? We can have quick and painful or slow and painful.” Auntie Gwen smiled at him, her dark, almost-black eyes seeming to catch the light instead of sparkle. “If I go too fast, I’ll catch soul-bits and those don’t grow back.”

He thought about it. “Is there a third choice?”

“Yes.”

“Do I want to know what it is?” The magic mirror on the wall across the room was suddenly showing both of them naked and a lot closer together than he ever planned on being. Damn this family’s obsession with sex. “No. Actually, quick and painful sounds good to me.”

“I thought so.” Auntie Gwen sighed. It sounded like regret.

Three weeks after she’d started, Graham noticed the first change. It was when he was hiking in the woods in Nose Hill Park with Allie, hand in hand and pausing every once in a while for a groping session against a tree. When he heard someone coming, Graham automatically tucked them both behind a small patch of trees, expecting what normally happened to happen, for the person to not see him at all and for Allie to take care of herself—except it hadn’t. Allie had had to literally charm both of them out of the park warden’s bad graces. His hex marks weren’t helping to hide him anymore.

“You’ll just have to practice your sneakiness.” Allie grinned at him then tackled him to the ground, one hand sneaking under his sweater and t-shirt. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the warden stumble, shake her head, and then head off in what he hoped was the right direction.

He’d seen the charm as Allie had drawn it in the dirt, seen it flare before it disappeared. He knew that Allie could still see it even if he couldn’t, just as he knew that he had a variety of charms on his body. Allie was sneaky about putting them on while he was sleeping, but he’d caught the amused glances of the others. The whole “seventh son of a seventh son” meant he could anchor Allie when he centered her family’s presence and rituals in the city, could even feel a shadow of what Allie felt, the ties to every living thing—human, animal, plant and random amoeba—in the greater Calgary area, but feeling that shadow was it. There were no magic powers appearing for him, and no ability to create charms, even if he was engaged to a whatever-the-Gale family was. That lack was fine by him.

It was all he had time for anyway. Graham had quit his second job of killing random supernatural creatures when he took over running the newspaper. In addition to writing a good part of the content, he'd had to learn the publishing end too. His former boss, Kalynchuk, aka Jonathan Samuel Gale, was very dead, and a growing gang of Gales were moving into town, wiping out all traces of the former sorcerer’s influence and cleaning up. Either the steady trickle of beings from the UnderRealm had stopped or they were avoiding Allie and thus he never met them. Maybe he hadn’t quit his second job so much as become underemployed.

“I thought we were looking for your brother David.”

“Saw him.”

“When?” Graham pulled the t-shirt back over his head, then reached under it and brushed off a couple of pine needles.

“About five minutes ago.”

Graham thought about that. Thought about what they’d been doing five minutes ago and hoped that David hadn’t been in his human form at the time. Somehow having a shapeshifted man-stag see them was better than having his almost-brother-in-law watching. “Ok. I am not complaining about the sex. Want that out right there, front and centre, and I want to keep doing it as often as possible.”

Allie giggled, leaned forward and kissed him on the neck. “Such a manly man.” Since they were almost the same height, he could feel her pressed against him all the way. She felt wonderful.

“And?”

“Sex.” He blushed. “Your Aunties Carmen and Bea have both propositioned me.” Auntie Gwen too, but Allie had been there for that. All three times. And when her cousin Katie had brought a new boyfriend home and invited them for a foursome. And Charlie—well Charlie didn’t really stop. He knew that she’d had a long-term relationship with Allie since the two women had both been teens, but he’d never really gone for the whole fantasy of watching women have sex thing. Much.

“And?” Her hands were rubbing up and down his spine in the way that she knew he liked.

“They’re both old enough to be my grandmothers.”

“Better get used to it.” Allie sat back and ran her right hand through his dark hair. It needed a cut. “The propositioning, I mean. Outsiders we marry don’t normally join in our circles. If I’m the family’s tie to the city and you’re my anchor, you’re going to have to accept that the mating drive doesn’t shut off after menopause.”

“Why the sex?”

“Beats the alternative,” she said, nipping then licking at his ear.

“You’re trying to distract me.”

“Working?”

“Yep.”

And that was that for then. He’d made himself scarce when Auntie Jane had blown into town to help with some organizing or destroying or something of one of Kalynchuk’s objects of power that they’d found hidden in a stash. That was one scary-ass woman. Luckily, some brownies from the UnderRealm had gotten drunk and instead of painting the town red, they’d cleaned out and repaired a crack-house. It was all over the news. Lots of confusion, plus the former owner making an uproar about reclaiming the house while the city, who’d gotten possession over back-taxes, were talking about making it a homeless shelter. Meanwhile the police were trying to track down the workers who’d fixed all the plumbing and ‘replaced’ all the broken glass without getting the proper permits. His sort of news. Working as a journalist for a weekly scandal rag had come in handy before. It still did.

He'd figured 'what the hell' and wrote it up that a group of brownies had visited Calgary, gotten drunk and repaired the house. Graham even got a quote from one of them, a short bearded, obsidian-haired Fae that couldn’t have been more than three feet high, with an Eastern European accent and a bad case of the sniffles. The letters-to-the-editor for that article had been three-to-one for believing his story, but it had been nothing to the quantity of letters they’d received after the Elvis sighting. Elvis Stoyko of course, not Elvis Presley.

Then Jack turned him into a recliner for a week and he missed the rest of Auntie Jane’s visit. All in all, he wasn’t quite as upset about it as he should have been, even if the Western Star had gone to print two-thirds of its normal size. Having Katie involved in working there had come in handy.

Jack... Jack was definitely on the insane side of Allie’s relatives. It hadn’t helped when Auntie Gwen had pointed out that since Kalynchuk had kidnapped Graham from his remaining relatives after the sorcerer had killed Graham's immediate family off and then technically raised him—although as the memories started creeping back and Graham could reflect on his early years with the sorcerer instead of never thinking about them at all, Graham considered himself having been halfway between an indentured servant and a slave—that as Jack was Stalynchuk’s thirteen year-old son, they were, in a way, step-brothers. Graham winced, tried to parse that last thought, and decided that there was no way he was considering himself a step-brother to a mostly crazy, half-dragon, half (almost half) human shapechanging instinctive sorcerer. Nope. No way in any of the UnderRealms.

As it turned out, Jack may have mixed up the guardian and “step-brother” sibling in-fighting too. He certaintly hadn't taken to being told to clean out the charred chair out of his room.

“You made a great recliner, Graham.”

“Thanks, Charlie. That means the world to me.” It was the evening after Aunties Bea and Gwen had brought him back to being human and Graham had decided to clean his weapons. All of them. It was taking a while and there were piles on either end of the table that could seat twelve, but he was steadily getting through them. It was soothing. So was the fact that Allie had taken Jack off to the dinosaur museum near Drumheller. Maybe Jack would find some relatives.

“Just that right mix of firm and soft,” Charlie strummed a chord on her guitar. Her hair had a white streak in it this week, a sharp contrast to the flaming red she’d dyed it shortly after joining a country music band. “I caught Joe napping on you a few times.”

Great. He’d been slept on by a leprechaun. “Anybody else?” Graham cracked open one of the rifles and peered down the barrel, then reached for one of the cleaning brushes.

“Allie, of course. Jack didn’t sleep on you, but he did spill his Captain Crunch. He offered to steam-clean you, but Allie stopped him. You know how she gets.”

“How about you?” Shit. Why’d he say that?

Charlie blinked, then she smiled at him. She looked so much like Allie, a shorter, flannel-shirt wearing, red-haired, wilder Allie, that his heart caught for a second. “Ask me again in a month and I’ll tell you. Allie’s already pretty settled into being second circle now and by then she’ll be calmer and more willing to share.”

He wasn’t sure whether he was glad or not when she packed up her guitar and left for a practice session.

Three weeks later, Allie had talked him into helping her go through some of the boxes in the basement below the junk shop, or rather, the “Enchantment Emporium”. Charlie had taken to calling it “The Emppy” until Allie had thrown a toy chicken at her, but to everyone else it was “The Emporium”. It was mostly just Allie and Joe working there right now, although everyone had been drafted for short periods of time. Well, everyone but the Aunties. Graham had now totally lost track of the number of relatives that were moving to the city. At least Auntie Bea and Carmen had finished moving into their new house and weren’t around as much.

The boxes were filled with bits and pieces of people’s lives, some carefully wrapped in tissue, some in old newspapers that dated from last year to the nineteen-thirties, and some just thrown in all together. After he’d found mouse droppings in the second box, he’d gotten Allie to toss him a pair of latex gloves.

“I don’t know why you enjoy going through this.”

Allie looked up, one hand resting on an old vinyl record that had long ago lost its protective cover. “It’s like when I worked in the museum.”

Graham spat out a bit of newspaper that had somehow drifted up to his mouth. “This isn’t a museum.”

“But it is. All these bits and pieces of people’s lives have meaning.” She reached under the record and some books and pulled out a brown leather purse that had seen better days. “In a hundred years or even fifty, most of this will be gone: buried, destroyed, burned or thrown away.” She opened the purse, pulled out a hundred dollar bill, then casually tucked it into her back pocket as if that sort of thing happened to her all the time. But then, she was a Gale; maybe it did. “Think about us, and about you; wouldn’t you want some of the pieces of your old life before your family house burned down? A bit of junk could be a treasure when the right person finds it. And in two hundred years, when we’re all dust and gone, bits of these will still be around; maybe in another junk shop, but maybe in a museum.”

She tossed the moldy books in the recycling box, the warped record in the trash bag, noted the brown purse in the open inventory program she had running on her laptop and then tossed it in the pile to take upstairs.

“Love you, Allie.”

“Love you too, Graham.” She moved another box. A small cloud of dust enveloped her feet and reached halfway up her body before it stopped like it had hit a wall. “Now help me move that big chest over there. There’s something funny about it and I want to make sure that’s not a death curse inscribed on the side.”

When the last of the hex marks were gone, Graham felt a strange mixture of relief and sadness. Memories of his family and his life in Quebec were still trickling back slower than he’d expected. He was also remembering a lot more of his time in the university journalism program and the three years afterwards when Stalynchuk had been in Detroit. Not fun times.

“What do you expect?” Auntie Gwen was making pie in the kitchen. Apple pie. Graham carefully considered whether he’d done anything at all to Auntie Gwen to tick her off, and became cautiously optimistic about getting some of it later on. He’d ask Allie first to make sure the pie didn’t have anything more than the normal “look in both directions before crossing the street” or “think before you speak” charms that Auntie Gwen was fond of. “You were thirteen. That’s Jack’s age. You’ve had charms, hexes and spells cast on you to fog your memory for most of your life. How much do you really expect to remember of your childhood?”

“Some people remember everything.” Graham took a piece of sliced apple and just avoided getting whacked on the back of his hand by a wooden spoon. “I bet you remember everything.”

“I’m a Gale.” She sniffed dismissively. “You’re not.”

Graham thought about asking Auntie Gwen for help remembering, but then thought better of it. Maybe he’d ask Allie.

The velvet Elvis painting’s eyes seemed to follow him as he went down the back set of stairs to the Emporium. The whole place had shifted noticeably since Allie’s arrival. More organized, definitely cleaner, and a number of dangerous charmed objects had been tucked behind the front desk. Joe had said he felt like a pharmacist these days, with all the good stuff behind the counter.

An older man, maybe a hard fifty or a younger sixty, was in the front corner by the window, looking at the pocket watches. Allie was talking to him, pointing out different ones and likely giving a run down on their history, workings and socio-cultural whatevers.

He looked familiar, like Graham had seen him before.

Allie looked up, caught his eye, then waved him over. “Graham. Glad you’re here.”

Graham walked over.

She caught his hand and tucked it into hers. “This is Samuel Buchanan. He’s in town on business, and just came in on a whim.”

“Oh.”

Allie jabbed him in the ribs. Hard. Graham looked over and into eyes just as vibrantly blue as his own. He didn’t know what to say. His tongue seemed glued in his mouth.

“Let’s go out to supper.” Allie grabbed her coat, told Joe to mind the store, then pulled Graham towards the door. “You too, Mr. Buchanan.”

“Um, miss?” Samuel Buchanan looked a bit confused, but he kept glancing at Graham with a puzzled look on his face, as if trying to remember where he’d known him.

“Maybe we should start with coffee. And pie. Definitely pie. We’ll go to the coffee shop next door.”

Graham felt a small piece of ice in his heart melt. He’d thought Allie had melted it all before, but this one had been tucked in some secret corner. Allie. Her crazy family. Her magical, coincidental, connected family. His family now. He squeezed her hand. You could never have enough family.


End file.
